Hi all! I'm the owner of the GitHub repo linked above. It's called "DAT8" because it was the 8th session of General Assembly's part-time Data Science course in Washington, DC.
Here's a bit of history, if you're interested:
- General Assembly launched a standardized Data Science course curriculum in mid-2013. The course used lots of slides, and taught both Python and R.
- Over time, the curriculum evolved in different directions as instructors around the world made their own modifications, both in terms of what was taught and how it was taught. By early 2015, I think all instructors had moved to teaching Python only.
- I taught the course five times starting in mid-2014. Over the course of those five sessions, I rewrote nearly all of the lessons and converted most of them to IPython/Jupyter notebooks. I would estimate that 95% of the material in the DAT8 repo is my original lessons.
- Earlier this year (2016), General Assembly rewrote and relaunched a standardized Data Science course curriculum. Therefore, if you take this course in the future, I would expect that you will be learning from that new curriculum.
For what it's worth, I wrote a 4000-word essay [1] about data science education after teaching the course the first time.
Really appreciate your comments here. And your essay (and the larger dataschool.io site), too. GA's data science class is one of several that I'm considering signing up for -- and I'm also considering applying to be an instructor. I think it's really promising that GA has instructors like you that seem to have both the interest in and latitude to make the course as enriching an experience as possible.
If you'd be open to answering some questions about your experience as an instructor, there's a few other things I'm curious about:
- What were your students like? Were they all qualified to be there? Were there challenges dealing with outliers (either overqualified or under)?
- What surprised or stretched you about your experience teaching at GA?
- What background did you bring to it before teaching there?
If you'd rather answer privately, email's in my profile.
Here's a bit of history, if you're interested:
- General Assembly launched a standardized Data Science course curriculum in mid-2013. The course used lots of slides, and taught both Python and R.
- Over time, the curriculum evolved in different directions as instructors around the world made their own modifications, both in terms of what was taught and how it was taught. By early 2015, I think all instructors had moved to teaching Python only.
- I taught the course five times starting in mid-2014. Over the course of those five sessions, I rewrote nearly all of the lessons and converted most of them to IPython/Jupyter notebooks. I would estimate that 95% of the material in the DAT8 repo is my original lessons.
- Earlier this year (2016), General Assembly rewrote and relaunched a standardized Data Science course curriculum. Therefore, if you take this course in the future, I would expect that you will be learning from that new curriculum.
For what it's worth, I wrote a 4000-word essay [1] about data science education after teaching the course the first time.
I'm happy to answer any questions!
[1] http://www.dataschool.io/teaching-data-science/